Chapter 507: 507. She Don’t Care About Professionalism Anymore! She’s Really Into Me!

On the sixth day, both Alexander and Elizabeth received a task to visit a dungeon called Greyveil, a name that did not inspire confidence; however, the academy’s field assessment classified it as a moderate-difficulty site suitable for reincarnators in their second or third month of active practice, making it the right choice for the cohort.

There were nine individuals in total: Alexander was in charge, accompanied by seven reincarnator students from the orientation session. Elizabeth was responsible for the academic documentation component, while Rex was included at Alexander’s insistence, as his practical experience would be beneficial in a controlled dungeon environment. Rex had agreed, knowing that declining would necessitate a justification.

The carriages left the academy gate at half past seven. The dungeon entrance was forty minutes outside Aethelgard, in the low hills to the southeast, where the rock formations had the specific quality that meant something had been built into them by people who were no longer around to explain why.

Elizabeth sat across from Rex in the second carriage, which she had arranged to share with him under the logic of documentation coordination, and Alexander was in the first carriage with the students. Elizabeth had the ledger open on her knee and was either making notes or pretending to make notes while Rex looked out the window at the morning.

"You slept four hours," she said, without looking up.

"Five," Rex said.

"That’s not enough."

"It was enough," Rex said.

She looked up from the ledger. "You should sleep more."

"The analysis work is going to require sustained focus, and you can’t sustain focus for five hours."

"Elizabeth," Rex said.

"What?"

"You slept four hours," Rex said. "Don’t tell me how to sleep."

She looked at him for a moment. Then she looked back at the ledger.

"That’s different," she said.

"How?"

"I’m used to it," she said.

Rex said nothing, and she responded with the specific expression she used when she knew she had not won an argument and had chosen not to continue it.

The carriage moved through the morning. Outside, the city transitioned into the roads leading away from it, which then opened up to the southeastern hills, while the sky remained a flat gray, reflecting a day that had not yet determined its character.

Elizabeth closed the ledger and looked out the window on her side.

"I’ve been thinking about the Seam House from the documents," she said. "And it seems like it’s also located in that kingdom."

"What about it?" Rex said.

"Kregg described it as a coastal fortress carved into a sea cliff," she said. "Seven days south."

"That puts it in the Sable Reaches, which means the local authority structure is fragmented enough that a permanent installation could operate without institutional notice for decades." She paused. "If the Legion uses it as a relay point rather than an operational base, it would explain why there’s no record of activity."

"The relay structure doesn’t require permanent staff," Rex said. "One or two people at each node, rotating, with no fixed presence."

"Which means investigating it directly produces minimal intelligence," Elizabeth said. "You’d arrive and find an empty building or a few unaffiliated civilians."

"Unless you arrived when the relay was active," Rex said.

Elizabeth looked at him. "And you could tell when that was."

"I’d need the timing from a higher node in the chain," Rex said. "Which we don’t have."

"Yet," Elizabeth said.

"Agree... and the key word is yet," Rex agreed.

She looked at the ledger in her hands and then at the window.

"You’re skilled at this," she remarked. "The analysis and the operational thinking."

"You follow the structure of it without having to rebuild it each time." She paused. "Most people, even talented analysts, have to retrace their steps when they come back to a problem. You never do."

"I keep the full picture," Rex said.

"Where?" she said.

He looked at her.

"I mean that genuinely," she said. "Where do you keep it?"

"It’s not written anywhere I’ve seen."

"Here," Rex said and touched his temple once, briefly.

Elizabeth regarded him with the same complex expression she had worn since the middle of last week, one that was difficult to categorize. She opened the ledger and wrote something down before closing it again.

"Alexander is going to expect us at the entrance by eight-thirty," she said.

"I know," Rex said.

She looked out the window. The dungeon was now visible, specifically the entrance, which appeared as a break in the hillside where the rock had been smoothed around a darker opening than the surrounding morning light.

The first carriage had already stopped, and Alexander was out and moving with the competence of a man organizing people, which he did well.

Elizabeth watched him through the window for a moment. Her expression was neutral.

Rex watched her watch Alexander.

"Elizabeth," Rex said.

She turned.

He said nothing else.

She looked at him for a long second, and then she turned back to the window and said, "We should get out."

The students gathered at the entrance, displaying a mix of nerves and forced composure that Rex recognized from every group poised to enter an unfamiliar situation. Alexander led the entry briefing smoothly, like someone who was used to this process: explaining how to form up, how to communicate, what to do if they needed to leave, and the specific rules about using system abilities in closed areas with tricky sounds.

He excelled at it. Rex had observed this during the orientation session and recognized it again now—the particular skill of someone who knew how to ready people for situations they weren’t even aware they needed to prepare for.

"Rex and Elizabeth will follow once the documentation setup is complete," Alexander said, looking at the two of them. "Give us ten minutes, then come in."

"We’ll be at the first chamber."

"Ten minutes," Elizabeth confirmed.

Alexander looked at her with the look he had been giving her all morning, the one that was reading something and not quite landing on it. Then he looked at Rex briefly, the same look but shorter, and then he turned and led the group into the entrance.

The dungeon swallowed them. The sound of footsteps and Alexander’s voice, giving directions, faded into the interior darkness. Then, it was quiet, except for the morning birds in the low hills and the wind moving through the rock formations.

Rex and Elizabeth stood at the entrance.

Elizabeth was holding the ledger and looking at the opening and not moving toward it.

"Documentation setup," Rex said. "Can you believe what he just said...?"

"Yes," she said.

She did not move.

Rex looked at her. She was looking at the entrance, and he could see the exact moment the calculation completed because her expression changed in the specific way it changed when she had reached a conclusion and was deciding whether to say it aloud or simply act on it.

She turned around.

She walked back toward the carriage.

Rex watched her go. She stopped beside the carriage door and looked back at him over her shoulder.

"The documentation can wait," she said.

Rex looked at the dungeon entrance, where Alexander and nine reincarnator students were somewhere in the first chamber, and then at Elizabeth standing at the carriage.

He walked toward her.

Inside the carriage, with the door closed and the morning light coming through the curtained windows in the diffuse way it came through curtained windows, Elizabeth sat back against the seat and looked at Rex with the expression she had stopped trying to manage sometime around day three.

"We’re going to be late," Rex said.

"I know," she said, and there was no particular concern in it.

"Alexander is going to notice."

"He’ll assume the documentation took longer," she said. "He always assumes the professional explanation."

Rex looked at her. "You’re counting on that."

"I have been counting on it for four days," she said, the most direct comment she had made about the situation, delivered without the guilt or qualifications she would have used a week ago. "That tells you something about where I am."

"Where are you?" Rex said.

She looked at him for a moment. Outside, the dungeon entrance was in the hillside forty feet away, and somewhere inside it Alexander was leading seven reincarnator students through the first chamber and probably wondering where the documentation team was.

"I’ve spent six days trying to understand what this is," Elizabeth said. "What I’m doing... What it means about who I am..."

"I have been very thorough about it." She paused. "And then I got in the carriage this morning and sat across from you for forty minutes and I couldn’t finish a single complete thought about anything except the fact that you were there."

Rex said nothing.

"That’s not who I am," she said. "I finish thoughts..."

"I have been finishing thoughts since I was seven years old... It’s the thing I am most reliably good at."

"And now," Rex said.

"And now I told Alexander the documentation would take ten minutes," she said, "and I walked back to the carriage, and here I am."

She held his gaze. "I don’t know what that makes me, and I have stopped caring what it makes me, which is also new."

She reached out and grasped the front of his jacket, her hold gentle but firm, not urgent, just steady.

"I should be in that dungeon," she said. "I have a professional responsibility to that session."

"Yes," Rex said. "And so?"

"I’m aware of that," she said.

"I know," Rex said.

She looked at him for one more second, and then she pulled him toward her by the jacket, and she said, close enough that the words landed before the sound did: "Let’s do it here."

And then she kissed him, and the dungeon stayed where it was, forty feet away in the hillside, and Alexander’s voice was somewhere inside it explaining something to someone, and none of that was in the carriage.

The morning moved around them without particular hurry.

Outside, a bird settled on the rock formation above the entrance, looked at the closed carriage door with the mild curiosity that birds show for things that are none of their business, and then flew away.

The documentation would be late.

Elizabeth had already decided she did not mind.

’I fucking did it... She’s broken... There’s no more of that bullshit thing called professionalism.’